Tuesday, February 18, 2014

Village on the Nile

This photograph was taken by Kathryn Howley, a graduate
student at Brown who is a member of our team. She’s using a variety of advanced
photographic techniques to document our work, including using software called
PhotoScan to stitch together lots of kite photographs to produce 3-D models of
the landscape around El Kurru. I’ll put up other examples of her work during
the season.

For now, though, this single photograph really captures the
feeling of El Kurru village. It’s a relatively small section of what is a
nearly continuous band of settlement along the Nile in Sudan. You can see the Nile
in the background, a band of palm (and mango) trees that are irrigated by
diesel pumps from the Nile, and then the village, which is on the desert
fringe.

It’s interesting that life goes on now without much direct
contact with the Nile. Travel is often easier along roads further out in the
desert, and with wells and pumps, we don’t even see the river most days.

In ancient times, of course, the relationship to water would
have been much more direct. Before about the 1st century BC,
irrigation was only possible using a shaduf
(a bucket on a pole with a counterweight), and this meant that the band of
irrigable land here would have been much narrower. The introduction of
waterwheels in the later Meroitic period made possible an expansion, but even
in 1919 when Reisner came to El Kurru, there was only a thin band of trees
along the Nile here.